“I have never understood it.” --William Gibson
I had a habit in my early teens of seeking out and reading books I probably shouldn’t have been reading. Which is another way of saying I was reading these books at just the right time for someone who was going to end up devoting his life to writing. Few things are more likely to turn a reader into a writer than the “wrong” book.
Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren was one of these books. It was supposed to be science fiction, the cover art of the Bantam paperback made it look like science fiction, and so I was expecting science-fictiony things to happen in it. Like rockets and robots and aliens, right? But the bizarre disjointed shit that went on in this book was like nothing in any of the science fiction or anything else that I’d read up to that point. In the first few pages, a woman turns into a tree. And then a lot of other bizarre, inexplicable things happen. The scarred and nameless Kid who’s the hero (is he?) of the book enters the “restricted” city of Bellona, where some kind of vague catastrophe has occurred, and society has collapsed. He hooks up with a gang of young people who go around covered in holographic light shields shaped like animals. One day a huge, red, swollen sun appears in the sky, apocalyptic and terrifying, and then after it sets, life goes on as before.
A lot of very real things happen in this book, too: people eat, and talk, and fight, and make love. Or rather, they fuck, sweatily and at great length. A boy falls into an empty elevator shaft and dies and his family grieves and tries to get on with their normal middle-class lifestyle in the midst of apocalypse (and all these years later here we are, catching up once more with fiction). The Kid writes poems and people actually read them and talk about them. (This was the early Seventies, remember, a time when art actually still mattered). Time skips and jumps. And everything, the fantastical and the explicit and the mundane, is rendered in the same vivid, meticulous, stream-of-consciousness-laced prose, which probably helped me to read Joyce when I finally got around to him.
One of the book’s mysteries: why is the novel called Dhalgren? It’s the last name of a very minor character who barely appears in the story.
Another mystery: how anyone was crazy enough to publish this 900-page monstrosity.
Someone once told me Delany’s novel was inspired by or based on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Having not read Mann’s novel at the time, I couldn’t confirm or deny the suggestion. Having since read The Magic Mountain I’m still not sure I see it. Not that it matters. Like William Gibson, I didn’t understand this book and still don’t. I can even sympathize with one Goodreads reviewer’s complaint about the book’s “exhausting, offputting, self-indulgent monotonous tedium of odd unpleasantness and pointless unwashed sexcapades stretched over a length of a doorstopper….”
(Having never had any sexcapades of any kind, unwashed or not, when I read this at the age of fourteen, I found these scenes stimulating and definitely educational).
What really mattered to me about Dhalgren and still does: the words it was made of. The author’s way of describing things was unfamiliar to me, shall we say. The narrating consciousness sometimes takes third person and sometimes first. The verbs were active, vigorous, sometimes irritating, like a bug flying into your ear. Even inanimate things seemed to have life and will in Delany’s sentences:
The asphalt spilled him onto the highway’s shoulder. The paving’s chipped edges filed visions off his eyes…. He looked in the lightening sky for shapes. Mist bellied and folded and coiled and never broke.
I hadn’t paid much attention to style before as a reader. I read to extract a story, no matter what sort of vessel the story came in. This book prodded and kicked its way into my consciousness, made me aware of the fact that there was more going on here than just story. Or maybe something other than story. A play with language that was crazy and “offputting” and sometimes boring, yes, and yet often dazzling and evocative, not to mention provocative. There was the weave of words themselves, the shaping of them like a physical substance. Dangerous, pointy, sticky, ambiguous, frighteningly alive, as if every word hides a bomb that might go off. It’s a wonder anyone writes fiction at all anymore in this terrified-to-give-offense era of ours, given how uncontrollable language always proves to be.
Reading Delany’s words I began to think that I would like to do that, too. Do interesting things with words. Or try to make words do things I didn’t know they could do.
That is how a reader became a writer.
[Image ID: Detail from the Bantam paperback cover of Dhalgren, showing three figures standing in front of a post-apocalyptic cityscape under a too-large sun].